This Pimple Popping Disaster Involving Wood Tools May Be the Worst Ever

We all know it's bad to pop your pimples. You've heard it from everyone — your mom, your best friend, your dermatologist, us (a thousand and one times) — and both read and watched the horror stories of pimple popping gone wrong. But here's an incident that can really be described as nightmarish. A guy used a blade made for woodworking to pop one of his zits and then developed a rare fungal lesion filled with budding yeast. It sounds unbelievable, but yes, this is a true story folks.

As Ars Technica points out, a recent article in The Journal of Emergency Medicine told the story of a 23-year-old man who, for some reason, used a woodworking blade to pop what he said was a pimple near his lower lip. Afterward, the man reported that a painful lesion had been growing for seven months in the spot where his snipped pimple was. Doctors described the lesion as "blood-crusted, warty plaque with a hardened border," Ars Technica reports. When they dug a little deeper, they found that a rare, budding form of yeast was festering inside his face. You can see a picture here, but it's pretty gross.

Ars Technica reports further testing revealed the fungus in the lesion to be Blastomyces conidia, which often lives in soil and wet and decaying areas near water. While the fungus is reportedly known to cause infection in humans, it typically manifests as a lung infection, which can develop into lesions like this guy's. The man in question, however, did not have a lung infection. The good news is that, after some treatment, the man reported the lesions cleared up in about two weeks.

If you absolutely must pop your own pimple, doctors recommend doing so in as clean a way as you can. “Treat popping a pimple like a surgical procedure,” New York City-based dermatologist Joshua Zeichner previously told Teen Vogue.

In other words, you probably shouldn't use a woodworking tool to hack at your zit.